


loneliness (please hold my hand)

by orphan_account



Category: Leverage
Genre: Angst, Arthritis, Child Neglect, Disability, Eliot Spencer's Cooking, Eliot Spencer-centric, Gen, Hurt Eliot Spencer, Introspection, Loss, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:07:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24064051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A life spent fighting has a lot of consequences. The physical aren't always immediate.Eliot never thought he would live long enough to deal with this.
Relationships: Alec Hardison & Parker & Eliot Spencer
Comments: 11
Kudos: 56





	loneliness (please hold my hand)

**Author's Note:**

> tw: eliot has some pretty bad thoughts toward a disability/the thought of feeling useless. There's some more info on this at the end. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

When Eliot was young he made music. This was before the army, before Moreau, when he made his home in the shadowed and forgotten corners of his father’s house and knew silence better than his own body. His grandmother had left an old piano in the house when she died, and although Eliot had never known her, couldn’t have remembered the sound of gnarled old fingers running on the dusty keyboard, there was something special about it. (He’d never believed in ghosts, barely had enough faith for god most days, but he could imagine serene waltzes and finnicky gigues ringing out from an old woman’s hands. Sometimes he thinks he can hear it.) 

His father didn’t play. He’d never had the inclination or the skill and there were other things on his mind by the time the piano was theirs. For Eliot, though, in a house where the air suffocated with tense stillness, something that was purely there for entertainment, for sound, was like a miracle. He remembers running small fingers over the keys, feeling the chasms next to the raised black notes, seeing how gently he had to press them down to make no noise at all. It was a ritual, the catalogued motion of his hands over ivory, the heady respect for this instrument that could be used to bring people joy. He never played loudly, he never played well, but what he produced was music and in the end that was all that mattered.

It’s the sort of power he finds in cooking, later.

When he is eleven his father sells the piano.  
~  
Eliot had joined the military because there was little else he could do. He’d never been particularly good at anything, or engaged in anything, and the military was somewhere he could belong. In the army there are lots of people who didn’t add up to much on their own, but as a group, a unit, he felt infinite.

Black-ops wasn’t bad. Secrecy had never been what he was aiming for, initially, it hadn’t been something he imagined he could be good at, could live with. There was still a team though, people to surround him and support him and fill all the places he was lacking so he added up to something useful. The first time he kills someone he knows, somehow, that he won’t forget it. For a while he thinks he will live every night seeing the blood on his hands, but he does it again and again and it get easy. Even though he had never really gone into this with the intention of hurting people, he quickly adapts to a new role. For the first time in his life there is something he is skilled at, something that makes him useful. If this is what he needs to do to be part of something bigger, to have the closest he has ever come to a family, he can pay the price of his soul.

He held onto that, kept it close to his heart, imagines it tattooed like a mantra in the dark spaces between his ribs. Remembered the old upright piano where he used to make music, that youthful wide-eyed wonder that came from being heard, and he thinks that anything he does, atrocities he commits, are worth the absolute knowledge that he is seen.  
That absolves him, in a way, until Moreau.

It doesn’t work so well after that, but the thing about building your entire soul and worth around a single melody is when the time comes it’s hard to let it go. He’s lived with this tune ringing between his ears for most of his life, and somewhere along the way that feeling of belonging, the sense of competence that he thrived in, became tied up in fighting. Even without a team at his back, making him whole, infinite, he finds he can’t live without it. It is a unique type of loss, running away from something you’re good at, the only thing you’ve ever been good at. He’s not surprised when it turns out that it’s a loss he’s not strong enough to bear.  
~  
See, the thing is, Eliot never really thought he would live long enough to deal with the consequences of his survival. Whenever he’s staggered back to whatever bolthole is providing him shelter, skin painted all variations of black and red and blue, he doesn’t really think about the future. Maybe it’s naïve, or cynical, but he thinks if he could see his own timeline, stretching out before him, it would be short enough that the only sort of lasting damage he would see would be the blow that finally kills him. 

Maybe it’s not pessimism. Maybe it’s hope.  
~  
There was a lot of downtime between jobs. Eliot wouldn’t say he didn’t enjoy it, but he wasn’t used to it. He’s been running them back to back for years now, trying to keep moving, to forget. In the end everything he does just ends with more blood on his hands, but he’s trying. Dropping the guns, now he only kills people when he hits too hard. A retrieval specialist, not a murderer, even if he sometimes thinks that one title fits better than the other. That song, that mantra that he used to justify his own existence, has long since stopped being enough. Although the feeling of being useful still thrums under his skin, it can’t numb the horrors he has committed. (He still doesn’t believe in ghosts, but sometimes red colours his skin all the way up to his elbows and he imagines he can feel hoards of people at his back. Sometimes he thinks he can hear them.)

But he can live with the downtime. There’s a sort of power in having a team again, in being useful to someone who cares about him. Having a team like this runs hand in hand with that embarrassing, giddy feeling of being seen, being heard, that he has been chasing ever since he first crashed keys together on his grandmother’s piano. Leverage gives him what the early days of the army gave him, that sense of belonging to something bigger than just himself. His sins may colour the whole but they don’t damn it. He likes making a difference to people’s lives in a way that isn’t just destructive; he likes having people that don’t expect him to kill, people he’s cautiously beginning to classify as friends. For the first time in a long time that sense of being infinite, powerful, resides under his skin like a protective blanket and in many ways this is better than the army. He thinks that maybe he has not only found a way to be seen, but also to be good.  
~  
He’s cooking, in the kitchen of the brewpub, the first time he notices it. The place isn’t even open, won’t be all weekend; Hardison and Parker are out scouting a job and he’s stuck here healing from a broken leg. A broken fucking leg. He doesn’t even know how it happened, particularly, a stupid mistake left with a stupid injury. He fell off a roof, and it would have almost been funny if he hadn’t been lying on the ground with waves of agony washing his vision red, white, black. Broken limbs aren’t new, but it doesn’t make them hurt less. 

It grates, that he can’t even walk well enough to do his job, protect his team, be useful. Grates that he had to go to hospital to fix this mistake, that he can still smell pain and antiseptic on his clothes, so he’s cooking. Cutting vegetables, an action he must have done a thousand times, with a knife that he’s been using since they opened, and it feels wrong. His fingers feel stiff, knuckles sore in a way that doesn’t make sense. He hasn’t fought anyone in a while, not with his leg like this, and there’s been enough time that he shouldn’t have any residual swelling.

In the end, he dismisses it as a psychosomatic ache, maybe brought on by irritation at his own uselessness. It will pass.  
~  
“Uh, Eliot man, you okay?”  
Elliot glances up at Hardison, glaring slightly. He can’t help it, because he’s surprised. Sure they’re a team, and they look out for each other, he looks after them, but he doesn’t know where the question comes from.  
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” It’s careful, maybe a touch more fond than he intends, but Hardison is looking at his hands, and Eliot realises he’s been running his fingers over them, suddenly registers the softly aching pain in his knuckles and the way the skin feels almost warm around his fingers. This is only the second time, and maybe some people would think nothing of it, but Eliot has spent a long time in a profession that requires him to know his body. He knows his aches and pains and how long they should last, has learnt to categorise any injuries as he gets them. So he knows that these have come from nowhere, and he’s not useless anymore. He knows that something is wrong.

He tells Hardison not to worry.  
~  
It doesn’t get better.  
~  
Maybe it’s ironic that he can ignore it best when he’s fighting. If it were anything else that might be amusing. When his knuckles collide with someone’s face, chest, neck, he feels the stress on his wrist and knuckles and the ache is justifiable. 

Understandable. 

He can explain it away with injury instead of something he’s scared to even consider, push down the terror that rises in his throat like bile when he thinks about the average lifespan of people in his line of work and how long he can realistically remain useful. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded once, but now it feels like a brand seared into his forehead, a vicious limit on how long he will be able to protect his team, these people he has begun to care about. (These people he loves.)  
~  
Cooking, again, and the pain in his fingers, his wrist, is white hot. Cutting vegetables and he can’t focus, his hands never doing quite what he wants, and instead of perfect slices he only gets oddly shaped chunks. There is an inadequacy there, hidden in the shape of the carrots, highlighting his deterioration. Incompetence is dangerous for someone with his job, for him and his team, but his fingers aren’t doing what he wants and he wonders how long he can last, what he can still do, if he can’t control his body. The joints cramp.

The knife falls to the floor.  
~  
The thing about living a life where he punches a lot of things, a lot of people, is that it puts a lot of pressure on his joints. He knew this, he thinks, knew the risks of repetitive strain injuries, what they could lead to. Knowing and caring, though, are entirely different things. If he had a reason to care before, a reason to avoid going out early enough that this would never be a problem, maybe he would have been more wary.

He avoids going to the doctor. After a couple of months, when it still hasn’t cleared up, he could be pretty sure of what it is. He knows these risks from the army, and he knows his body. He doesn’t need some hospital confrontation to tell him what he’s already accepted.

Somewhat accepted.

He really never expected to live long enough for all those little risks to actually become a problem.  
~  
Later, when the pain in his fingers flairs and he drops a knife whilst cutting vegetables, he remembers the piano. He hasn’t thought of it in years, not since he left black-ops and the simple faith he’d put in being seen and heard stopped working. Maybe it’s right that it comes back now, when he has a team that sees him and he’s stuck living, waiting for the day he fails them. He remembers running tiny fingers over the ridges of the keys, mapping out music in dust on the flat mahogany lid. He never learnt to read notes, although he thinks he would have liked to, if he had the chance. The music had never been nice, but it had been good, somewhere deep down.

He imagines running his fingers, swollen and useless, over the keys of an ancient piano, sold somewhere for the money to buy alcohol.

He imagines trying to press the keys, imagines the music, and is afraid he wouldn’t be able to make it anymore even if he tried.

**Author's Note:**

> Just to be clear I don't feel that people with disabilities should be in any way considered useless. I have a mild movement based disorder in my hands, and arthritis runs in my family, so a lot of this is echoing thoughts and fears I've had toward myself. Eliot's a great character to vent through, but I hope it gives an interesting perspective on his character and this issue.
> 
> Let me know what you thought! :)


End file.
